With a budget of more than $5 billion, Proctor & Gamble is the world's largest advertiser. It is very bad news for network TV when its P&G's Global Marketing Officer Jim Spangle says that today's marketing model is broken. This can be seen everywhere. Over the last ten years, American Express has reduced its TV network spending from 80% of its budget to under 30%. This trend can be seen in virtually every category.
A business model that has worked of over 50 years is slowly collapsing. Over the last decade, Nielsen reports that network TV has seen its audience decline 20% when the U.S. population actually grew by 30 million. During this time, the advertising cost to reach buyers has nearly tripled.
How bad will it get? A glimpse of the future can be seen in today's tech-savvy males aged 18-32. For them, traditional advertising is a complete waste of money. A Wired Magazine article documented how they are virtually impossible to market to. The article was called “The Lost Boys.”
Where will the estimated $75 billion in annual network TV advertising end up? Amex CMO John Hayes says that there is no immediate place to redirect ad budgets but warns that “those who are unprepared for change will obviously suffer the consequences.” Forrester Research's Chris Sharon warns that network TV have a lot at stake in the status quo, so it will not be fast to look elsewhere. David Poltrack, head of research at CBS, believes that if advertisers and marketers abandon network TV, the “entire marketing infrastructure of the country and the economy is going to be diminished.” Not surprisingly, Viacom is looking at ways to spin-off CBS.
Viacom is not alone. Rupert Murdock's News Corp commissioned McKinsey & Company to figure out how to transition from network TV to the Internet. In August 2005, News Corp reported plans to create a major portal and expand on the Internet. Murdoch said, “There is no greater priority for the company today” and announced plans to spend about “$2 billion on Internet acquisitions.”
Jupiter Research predicts that online advertising will overtake magazine advertising in 2007 when total online ad spending hits $13.8 billion, or 6% of offline ad spending. The CEO of the Direct Marketing Association put it bluntly when he said it is at a “critical juncture in its history”.
With respect to Internet search engines, billions of dollars are already being redirected to the Internet, and firms want to benefit from this in the same way as Google has. Google now has a market valuation of more than four times Ford and General Motors combined. The reason why search engine companies are so hot is simple—70% of online purchases start with a search. Thousands of search engine marketing (SEM) companies have appeared almost overnight to help advertisers place these billions of redirected dollars. The most powerful eCommerce brands are now investing heavily in search technologies so that they can claim their share of this 70%.
As shown in FIG. 1, typical search engine technologies 100 in accordance with the prior art use keyword search engines 102 that include a keyword search index 104 communicably coupled to a data storage 106 and sponsored links 108. The keyword search index 104 is populated with terms used by buyers 110 when conducting a search. The keyword search engine 102 scours the Internet (World Wide Web) 112 for documents or web pages that contain the keywords. The documents, web pages or relevant data to link or point to such document and web pages are stored in data storage 106, which is used to further populate the keyword search index 104. The searching, storing, selecting mechanisms are extremely complicated and require massive data storage and processing power. Sellers 114 typically purchase the option to have their sponsored links 108 included in the search results provided to buyer 110 based on various criteria. As a result, advertising drive current search engine technologies.
In spite of their recent success, current search engine technologies still leave lots of room for improvement:                98% of Google's revenue comes from advertising, and an estimated 10-30% of it is from “click fraud” where people intentionally click on ads to drain rival company budgets. Google's CFO said, “Something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model”.        New search engine technologies are often wasted. When Google introduced its desktop search capability, its rivals launched free copycat services. Technologies (1) with no direct revenue models that (2) can be copied are great for users but have a smaller impact on profitability and differentiation.        New, unique technologies need to be defensible. No firm wants to be the next Netscape—a firm that was specifically targeted and quickly crushed by Microsoft.        Current technologies are wasteful. When Yahoo announced that it had indexed billions more Web pages than Google, search engine expert Danny Sullivan said, “Screw size! I dare Google & Yahoo to report on relevancy . . . . You need the whole haystack! Here, if I dump it all on your head, can you find the needle now?”        Search engine relevancy is becoming a key goal for all brands. In October 2005, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer said “50% of all searches do not go to desired outcome . . . people can't find what they are looking for . . . relevance is job one.”        Search engine relevance is currently based on complex algorithms that try to anticipate and analyze what a person wants. These continue to get more complex with diminishing improvements.        To improve relevance, search engine technologies attempt to capture more and more personal information. This is inconsistent with what people want because of increased fraud and identity theft, which is now the fastest growing crime in America.        The new industry of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) firms now manipulates search results to satisfy the needs of the advertiser and not the buyer. The best “sponsored links” are generally sold to advertisers that pay the most money. The ranking of “organic” search results can also be manipulated to the point where the search results have little to do with what was requested. Not at all buyer-centric.        The amount of feedback and marketing information available to advertisers is limited. There is currently no way to measure or act upon partial interest by measuring “close hits” or “lost sales.”        Current technologies do not respect the time of the consumer because the results are often not relevant. Clicking on a link often leads to more time searching a Website.        Current search engine technologies do not maximize the Internet's full potential because they do not give Sellers proactive tools. They still have to wait for a Buyer to click on a sponsored link or organic listing. This is the business equivalent to a teenage girl sitting by the phone waiting for her boyfriend to call.        
The last two points are worth further explanation with the typical Google search result. For example, FIG. 2 is an example of a user interface and search result in accordance with the prior art. It is typical for Google to return a bewildering array of more than 6 million results 200. The “organic” results 202 are on the left and the “sponsored links” 204 are on the top left and on the right. Ninety-eight percent of Google's revenue comes from these sponsored links 204. Thousands of SEM companies help advertisers position themselves close to the top of organic 202 and sponsored search results 204 to increase the likelihood of being noticed by the buyer.
Eye-tracking technologies illustrate what gets noticed:                The sponsored links above the organic listing gets some.        The first three organic listings on the left get the most.        The sponsored links on the right get fewer results.        People don't go down the results very far.These studies reveal show that people do not want to spend lots of time searching, and advertisers are 100% dependent on being found by the person. What is needed is a new type of search engine technology that solves these problems.        
With advertising, there is a delicate balance between what is good for a consumer and what is good for an advertiser. For example, what is good for a consumer is almost always bad for an advertiser, and visa versa:                80 million people have signed up for the Do Not Call list, but this has hurt the telemarketing industry.        Spam is incredibly cost-efficient, but alienates consumers.        Privacy policies and trust seals from firms like BBBOnline and TRUSTe were supposed to protect consumers, but have been reduced to legal disclaimers that protect companies.        Accurate personalization can increase click-through rates, but collecting the necessary information can be intrusive.        Advertising reduced prices are almost always used to attract new consumers, but this erodes margins and attracts the least loyal consumers.What is needed is a new search engine technology that creates a win-win for both consumers and advertisers.        
Current search engine technologies have specific flaws. From an eCommerce perspective, current search engine technologies use the basic design shown in FIG. 1. While hugely profitable, this design has significant problems:                Sellers create a Website, with the possible help from Search Engine Marketing (SEM) companies. These companies attempt to manipulate the algorithms used by a search engine when it ranks “organic” search results. This manipulation is good for Sellers and not good for Buyers.        This, along with billions of other Web pages, are “scraped” or “crawled” by the search engine and put into Data Storage and Search Index for later access. Billions of Web pages are analyzed and it is estimated that Google requires over 150,000 servers to complete searches by sheer brute force:        On average, a single query reads hundreds of megabytes of data and consumes tens of billions of CPU cycles.        Google's PageRank algorithm performs an objective measurement of the importance of Webpages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.        At this scale, some limits of massive server parallelism become apparent, such as the limited cooling capacity of commercial data centers.        Sellers, with the possible help of SEM companies, use their advertising budgets to pay for Sponsored Links that are also added to the Search Index. The manipulation is dependent on the amount of money the Seller is willing to pay, whether or not the Seller's offer has anything to do with what the Buyer wants. This again is good for Sellers and not good for Buyers.        Sellers must wait for a Buyer to type a specific keyword. Nothing happens until then, which is not good for Sellers.        The search engine does not know in advance what the Buyer wants, so when the Buyer types one or more keywords, the search engine must have sufficient hardware and complex algorithms to return the results quickly. According to Urs Hoelzle, Google's Google's VP of Engineering, “exactly what will be searched for on any given day is never predictable [so] keeping the 10 billion pages of the Web close at hand is a daunting challenge.”        The search results have more to do with the Seller's manipulation than the Buyer's needs. This lack of relevance, plus the hundreds, thousands, or even millions of results, make analysis of the search results complex, which is not good for the Buyer.        Some search engines technologies use behavioral and/or tracking methods to attempt to increase the relevance of the search results for the Buyer. This potentially invades the privacy of the Buyer.        If the Buyer clicks on an organic link in the Search Index, control is passed to the Seller's Website. Once there, the Buyer is left to navigate the Website with no additional help. This can be very time consuming. In some cases, the Buyer must register or answer personal questions to get the desired information from the Seller.        If the Buyer clicks on a sponsored link in the Search Index, the Seller is charged a fee and control is passed to the Seller's Website. It is possible for anyone to click on a link, and the resulting “click fraud” hurts both the Seller and the search ending company. Again, the Buyer must navigate the Website to find the desired information.        If the Buyer does not click on an organic or sponsored link, the Buyer has little or no marketing intelligence to help learn from the event. There is no way to quantify a “close hit” or “lost sale.” The Seller is in a very limited react mode.        
Accordingly there is a need for a system, method and apparatus for electronically searching for an item that provides relevant search results, persistent searching and protects the privacy of its users.